GRGR(15): Enzian, nihilism, and a few other things

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Jeremy Osner wrote:

> 
> I think in these couple paragraphs Enzian sounds almost like a Herero
> Pointsman. Whose paperwork is it, invented by whom? It isn't Nazi
> paperwork because there is no more Nazi government -- is is Zone-Herero
> paperwork? I reckon it is, and that throws the Empty Ones' tribal
> suicide into a whole new light -- a distinctly European,
> nihilistic/bureaucratic light -- tribal governments don't run on forms.
> And speaking of Empty Ones, is Enzian one? I guess not because "He has
> thus himself found a strange rapprochement with the Empty Ones"; what
> determines whether a Zone-Herero is an Empty One? Are the Empty Ones the
> governing body of the Zone-Hereros? the government in exile so to speak?


Enzian receives word of trouble among the Hereros in
Hamburg. He is not sure if this is a trap set by
Tchitcherine--they are both searching for the Schwarzgerat,
but he is heading North. The will to Death, the Love of the
Rocket is not a Western thing, a christian thing, no, it has
spread to others, like the Otukungurua, the Empty Ones as
well. How did this happen? The Zone-Hereros, remember that
Mondaugen came in with the Wind earlier in the book, have
been subjected to the common indignity visited upon a people
by another people, tourists usually, tourists and voyeurs
that conquer. So, some of these folks, not the least
christian among them, have conceived a plan to Zero, they
are S.O.S. In some ways the Empty ones seem like Nora
Dodson-Truck (perhaps she has something to do with that
women buried in the ground), "Revolutionaries of the Zero."
These guys seem to think of themselves as cut off from a
life, like those stories I've read about animals that chew
their legs off to get out of a trap and limp through life
not quite themselves for the experience, these guys seem to
have lost a community, now they seem misfits, exiled from a
world complete with myths and symbols, that once provided a
world view. Now, they wear untied leather thongs to
symbolize their loss: "it is a bit of the old symbolism they
have found useful." The Otukungurua are, what father fagot
used to call me, heretical, but they are not only heretical
christains, they are heretical Herero too. The Herero, now
believe in Apocalypse, but not the one in SJD'd Revelation,
oh no. I saw a play a few years back, maturbation in the
Philippines, I sat next to a friend who closed his eyes, he
is a Catholic priest from China, I love this double irony,
these people believe in the tribal fertility rituals and
yet, "these Otukungurua are prophets of masturbating,
specialists in abortion and sterilization, pitchmen for acts
oral and anal, pedal and digital, sodomistical and
zoophiliac..." Can't have a baby that way father can You?
But this is not father fagot breaking his alter boy's bottom
and god's commandments, no this is permitted, deliberately
and (w)holy divorced from procreation, it is the Will to
Death. Suicide, says Josef, is "the most erotic thing there
is." Are these folks mad? Maybe not. Maybe some sort of
rough beast has slouched towards the Heart of Africa, some
second something, and the "the gods [have] left the people"
when the christians came into their lives with the con man.
Maybe this imperialism is not Karl, so economic and
political (though Pynchon will do what he does here to Marx
to Carl jung later) but Cultural, "Colonies are the
outhouses of the European soul..." and maybe the repressed
returns on the repressed, oh bitter irony, death, death and
repression, but Enzian, confused and confusing guy to me,
sees the christian sickness, that soul has infected us all,
jesus has been passed over, it is finished, all but the
Love, but the "love for the last explosion" the Zero born in
the north. It's cold, mediaeval cartography, cold and white,
Nordhausen-dwelling in the north, a bit of redundancy,
Bleicherode, Enzian is going North... 

way down in the hole, you gotta help me keep the devil...